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Sunday, January 12, 2014

Krell's Children: Grave Guard Chaos Warriors!

Astute readers might recognize some of the half-finished an totally-not-game-legal conversions I attempted several years back with the 5th edition (?) hunchbacked plastic chaos warriors. Carpe Noctem happens to be doing a "Krell's Children" challenge this month, where the goal is to convert some chaos warriors (presumably the CURRENT ones!) into the undead. I thought it'd be the perfect time to revisit my old abortions I MEAN VALIANT ATTEMPTS AT CONVERSION

The originals were quite honestly a bit of a mess... I tried just mixing up the 5th edition skeleton and chaos warrior sprues to varying effect, but didn't get much in the way of working models. The parts seemed too disparate to blend together well. I also didn't do a particularly good job of figuring out how the parts were supposed to work together, as evinced by the bevor (neck protection) being used as a crotch guard on one of 'em... thank goodness for googling these days. I wanted to make sure the new guys fit onto the game-legal 20mm bases and also roughly matched proportions with the current skeletons, so I've got my 10 most recently finished sword-and-board skellies here to help with sizing. Here's the pile in progress. You can see I sanded the torsos down significantly, which helps to narrow the frame. Hopefully this will also make it possible for them to carry shields and still rank up.

I went even further with the mix-and-match approach this time, making sure I broke off legs and arms and attaching skeleton bones between, so that it actually looks like there's a skeleton inside the armor. Hopefully the results seem a bit more like skellies in chaos warrior garb, and less like a mix-n-match.

I wanted to get in a few shots with some of the other varied undead models than I plan to put in the grave guard unit. I really want it to have a mix-n-match look, so you'll see a couple reaper models and one very cool undead dwarf with twin hammers from Stonehaven Miniature's kickstarter hiding in the background.

I may or may not decide to do a bit more with the colors and give them a "4 gods and 1 undivided" color scheme... the silver drybrushing over black was simple and fast but I feel like it's a bit much for an entire unit.

In completely unrelated news, I finally finished those Forge World Skaven Wolf Rats that have been on my painting table for about a year... I went for a quick-n-dirty grey palette that will let 'em join my units of Battle Masters wolves as dire wolves. Now I've got about twenty for the glory of the undead! I'm particularly fond of the dirty, bloody bandage look that I think came out pretty well.

Since I was going for quick 'n dirty, I basically drybrushed the entire model in progressively lightening shades of gray. I picked out the leather with a light coat of brown, and since it was already shaded from the gray drybrushing, the highlighting was already there. I picked out the bandages with some off-white and then did some gooey reddish black splotches all over 'em. (I figured anyone willing to bandage up a bunch of ravenous wolf rats only wanted 'em to live long enough to fight a battle and wouldn't do a great job of it!) The whole thing was pretty fun, but then, I'm a drybrushing addict. The level of detail on the forgeworld stuff is amazing.